How to paint a room

how to paint a room

How To Paint A Room

How to paint a room is a question asked quite a lot these days. With most people shut in their homes due to COVID-19 or Coronavirus and looking around for something to do. If you are lucky enough to have access to paint and painting tools and you just need to know exactly how to paint a room then read on.

When painting a room it’s best to complete the entire room, ceiling to skirting boards, in one go. If you think it would be easier to do it in bits and pieces, ceiling one day, some walls a couple of days later and so on then think again. If you go about painting your room in a piecemeal fashion it will take so much longer and will probably not look as well.

how to paint a room

The first thing you need to do is make sure you have enough paint for the ceiling, walls and woodwork. A standard size living room, in a 3-bed semi-detached house, for example, will need about 5 litres of ceiling paint, 5 litres of wall paint and between 1 litre to 2.5 litres of woodwork paint. This is assuming 2 coats of paint throughout. If you think it’s going to take more than 2 coats of paint then you might need to up the quantity a bit.

You might also need some wall filler (Polyfilla/Toupret) for any holes in the walls or ceiling and you will need a tube of caulk for any gaps or cracks where woodwork meets the wall.

You will need to make sure have all the right tools too. You will need the following tools:

Paint sheets and some plastic for covering furniture.
A stepladder.
Paint brushes for walls and woodwork.
Paint rollers & rolling pole.
Paint tray or paint scuttle.
Filling knives & caulk gun
Masking tape & low tack masking tape.
Wallpaper steamer (if removing wallpaper).

Before you start painting your walls etc you will need to make sure they are clean, if you use a damp cloth and give a section of the wall a good rub down you will be able to tell if there’s grime that needs to be removed. If grimy then use sugar soap or a product called KrudKutter to clean down the surface. Painting is all about preparation, if the surface is dirty then painting over it is going to guarantee a bad finish!

If removing old wallpaper then it’s best to use a steamer. Working from the top of the wall down remove the paper in sections. Once all the wallpaper has been removed you will need to scrub the walls to remove the old glue. You can pick up a product to help with this from a paint shop like Stillorgan Decor.

how to paint a room

Now we answer how to paint a room.

Assuming the ceiling, walls and woodwork have been prepared and cleaned then the first step in how to paint a room is to move furniture to the middle of the room. Then take down pictures from the walls, take down curtains etc. Put everything in the middle of the room and cover with your plastic sheets. Tape the plastic into position with the masking tape.

Now starting with your ceiling paint, using a 3 inch emulsion paint brush, paint all around the edges of the ceiling. The area of ceiling that meets the walls, also paint around any light fittings.

Once this is done you can paint the rest of the ceiling using your paint roller. When rolling the ceiling with the paint roller make sure to start close to a light source like a window and work back into the room. There’s a good reason for this, if you work away from the light it’s easy to see where you are and if there are any misses. If you work towards the light then it’s going to be a lot harder to see where you are going and what’s been done. I know this sounds obvious but you would be surprised by the amount of people that paint the ceiling towards the light and the wonder why then, there are so many misses afterwards!

Once the ceiling has been finished you can move on to sanding down the woodwork and then painting the walls. There’s a couple of ways you can go from here. Usually, we would undercoat the walls and woodwork first, then finish the walls and finally finish the woodwork. A professional & experienced painter will be able to paint a nice straight line between the walls and the woodwork. If you don’t feel confident enough to do this then there is another option.

Instead of finishing the walls first, you can bring them up to a finish, just don’t apply the final coat. Next paint your woodwork, it’s best to carry out any filling in between coats then touch up the filler and apply the finish coat. By now you should have some nicely painted woodwork. Leave the woodwork alone until it’s good and dry, overnight at least. Next, using a low tack painters tape, tape along the tops of the skirting boards and down the sides of the architraves etc. Make sure the tape is stuck well. When this is done crack on and paint the walls, the same way you would paint the ceiling. Use the paintbrush and go around all the edges first and make sure to paint around sockets etc. This paintwork is called cutting in, once everything has been cut in you can roll out the walls. If the paint looks good and solid then you can peel back the low tack masking tape to reveal laser sharp lines between walls and woodwork!

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